Clippings: The Summer of Our Discontent
Hilarious article by Joe Queenan over at the WSJ summing up Summer 2009, featuring wonderful clips like
Sonya Sotomayor’s Supreme Court nomination did not morph into an ideological Thermophylae where a pitched battle for, yea, the very soul of the nation hung in the balance. Gitmo did not get shuttered. Mr. Obama stubbornly refused to pick a fight with anybody. Tina Fey didn’t do any funny new impressions. Joe Biden didn’t say anything ridiculous. What were the odds of that?
and
This was also the summer when journalists kept trying to tell the American people that they were missing something really important, when deep inside they knew they were not.
and
The press kept writing stories about people getting laid off and furloughed. Then journalists started getting laid off, and those that had not been laid off started writing stories about how journalists getting laid off—or furloughed—was hurting the economy because now there would be even fewer people to write stories about people who had been laid off. Or furloughed.
and
Obviously this summer could not possibly measure up to the standards of the summer of 2008. It did not have the millennial hoopla supplied by Barack Obama’s stunning ascent to the highest office in the land. It did not have Sarah Palin. It did not have the return of the Weathermen to the national stage and the enthralling, quixotic candidacy of Mike Huckabee. Nor did it have the astonishing demise of Bear Stearns, the implosion of AIG, the ritual seppuku of the American auto industry. It did not have Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers, Countrywide Financial or routine 500-point one-day drops in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It did not have the overnight collapse of the global economic system, with the concomitant, looming possibility that life as we know it would be extinguished.
So, obviously, 2008 was going to be a tough act to follow.
Full and enormously funny post here.
And because this is such an inspired bit of commentary and Joe Queenan has amused me, here are more links to more works by him. (I note he’s also a fellow survivor of abuse, and it’s always amusing how we never are quite right in the head. Hopefully we live out our lives and amuse other people.)
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Closing Time (Kindle Book) • (Hardcover) — a personal memoir apparently both praised and derided in equal measure
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Queenan Country (Kindle Book) • (Paperback) • (Hardcover) — a reluctant love letter to Great Britain
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Malcontents (Paperback) — edited an anthology of malicious humor collected from satirists from across the centuries, including Mark Twain, Candide, Machiavelli, and the dude who wrote “A Modest Proposal.” Truly Queenan is a man after my own heart, and I eagerly await its induction into the Kindle store.
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Gusworld’s Joe Queenan Directory (not by Joe Queenan)
Hat tip to Whatever and the wisdom of John Scalzi.
